Re: Furrin phones in my own lect!

Carsten Becker wrote:

> You mean unaspirated [p t k], don't you? [R] isn't that hard
> for me. Neither is [X]. ;) I don't know how to pronounce [q]
> properly, though. I always haven an uvular offglide there
> somehow.
Yes, there are certainly some contexts in which sounds like [q] are hard
to pronounce correctly, [qi] for instance. (In Olaetian, which as my
first language turned out to be the one that many of the interesting
"foreign" sounds ended up in, /q/ can only occur before back vowels; a
sort of [M]-like glide written as "u" intervenes between /q/ and a front
vowel.)

But it was really just [k] (unaspirated) that was the difficult one for
me; [p] and [t] came much easier for some reason I don't quite
understand. I probably learned them subconsciously while learning
Spanish, but that doesn't explain why I didn't get [k] right.

The only time I was able to reliably pronounce [R] was when I was
learning German and actively practicing the sound. But I guess I've
exaggerated its difficulty a bit. I was thinking mainly of sounds
represented by IPA characters, and didn't consider all the variations of
sounds that require diacritics (not to mention the ones not easily
represented in IPA at all, like those Korean stops Henrik Theiling
mentioned). I'm guessing the weird American English "r" is probably as
difficult for native German speakers, even though it's a relatively easy
sound for native American speakers like me.

  But yeah, there are many sound I don't know how to
> pronounce, especially most of the central vowels except [3],
> [@] and [6]. I attestedly don't get [1] right as well. A
> Russian friend of mine: "Ah, it's typical. Germans *never*
> get that one right." Better don't ask me about [_j] either.
> However, it also seems typical for German speakers to have
> difficulties with [H], i.e., many people in my French class
> say [pyi] for [pH] <puis>. Also, vi Tshermens are known for
> mixing up [T] and [s] and [w] and [v].
>
> Carsten
I haven't got a good handle on the central vowels either, and it doesn't
help that no two IPA sound sites agree on what they're supposed to sound
like. But not many languages have vowels exactly aligned with the IPA
symbols anyway. It's easier to just listen to a recording and imitate
than to try to make sense out of the often inconsistent IPA
representations of vowel sounds (which I'm guessing may be due in some
cases to historical changes in the set of sounds that had IPA symbols).